For our interview series, the GCPR-Blog team talked to Maja Rečnik from GlobalCom’s Slovenian partner SPEM Communication Group about the latest trends in the Slovenian market.*

1. Which industries/markets are booming at the moment in Slovenia?

The market in Slovenia is still recovering from the financial and government crisis and companies, which have strong relations to foreign markets, or they are dealing with new technologies or mobile communications are most successful at the moment. There are e.g. successful IT start-ups, which have managed to gain foreign capital for their development. Traditionally we have strong domestic pharmaceutical companies and national owned banks and insurances. In addition there are innovative companies in the design and technology market, which have managed to build a brand internationally, or had a strong brand even before crisis.

2. What makes Slovenia currently so interesting for this industry?

Slovenia has a very high level of knowledge and expertise in natural sciences; it also offers very prosperous employment opportunities for young people coming from the SE region countries, which have not joined EU yet. So Slovenia offers a good qualitative labor force for a reasonable price in an EU environment. The know-how in IT is also appreciated at the international competitions like the Microsoft’s. Foreign investments are rare because of the restrictive policy of the government until now and depend mostly from the ambitions of the companies which managed to gain foreign investors capital.

3. Why should companies from these industries start doing Public Relations in Slovenia?

I think the companies can profit from investing into public relations as PR specialist can help them to deliver the right content and understanding to all target groups and stakeholders. In that way we can cooperate on different projects for our clients with IT and web experts, experts in mobile applications and design very well. The PR agencies themselves have also strongly reorganized and rebranded to adapt to the digital era and the market challenges. Sustainability development projects and CSR are another area of expertise on which PR agencies will focus and specialize in the next month and years. The more traditional ways of advertising are not as effective any more and companies are looking for new ways to spend their marketing budget more effectively. PR agencies are the ones who can follow trends and educate their clients about creative investment of their money to build customer’s loyalty.

*The series is based on phone or face-to-face interviews and written input, therefore please excuse language mistakes which might reflect foreign language influences.